[Loughla]

>I don't see many reasons why a site owner would spend extraordinary amounts of time to "carefully craft" page titles

Because I want the title to be concise, but still help people explicitly understand what my writing is about? Because I've already spent a lot of time on the content, to then just slap 'Lou's Wednesday Website Update' as a title? Because, historically, a title is an introduction to my writing?

Any of those.

[judge2020]

Regarding one of these examples:

  How to Fix a Broken iPhone Screen [Tested by Experts] - Phone Fixer

->

  How to Fix a Broken iPhone Screen - Phone Fixer

Tested by Experts is obviously clickbait; nobody's going to say [Tested by novices].

Same for things like [Updated 2022] - there are tons of websites that superimpose [updated <currentyear>] even if the article content wasn't updated.

[fma]

If Google believes the site is being disingenuous by writing a click bait headline, then they should punish the site by decreasing their ranking, not reward it by keeping it high and rewriting a more fitting headline.

[karaterobot]

But if the title is spam, and the content is good (this is a big 'if'), the best solution would be to rewrite the title so that it's useful and keep the page at its original rank, based on the content. Ideally, Google would be able to handle all these different cases and just give me the best search results. Now, we all know that's increasingly less true, but in theory that's how it should work.

[jtbayly]

But “for 2022” is a guarantee that the content is bad if it hasn’t changed in 2022.

And yet, I don’t see how Google can automate checking this. It’s possible to add a couple of sentences about how you’ve not seen anything to change your mind about last year’s recommendations. That may well be true. Or false. How can Google know? It just sees content that has changed. So it has been updated in 2022.

The bigger issue is brand trust (as a reviewer brand). The NYT bought Wirecutter, I think, because it had established itself as a trustworthy brand. That’s in direct line with the reputation the NYT wants to have as a whole.

[ziml77]

I hate how true your second paragraph is. Google should punish sites that change the date without updating the content, but all the SEO spam is just going to automate changing content when it changes the date. And then what does Google do? Figure out how to make an AI that can understand all the indexed content and accurately determine if it's truthful?

That seems fundamentally impossible without defining trusted sources. But then that means that you're trusting that Google's trusted sources are good. And if you do think they're good, then why not just check those sources directly?

The only answer I have is to find your own sources that you trust and go to them first.

[b112]

But if the title is spam, and the content is good

Then the content would not need to be spam, to be high ranking.

Not if google just cared about content quality.

So in this scenario, where only quality counts for rankings, all a spammy title shows, is the desire to bypass legitimate rankings.

Thus, it should be downranked.

Again, this was if Google legitimately wanted to rank good content high.

[zepearl]

I'm not convinced, in general I don't like this additional layer of "fiddling around" with the original contents.

What about the opposite, the title being great but the contents not really? Shall Google serve its own "improved"/"summarized"/whatever version?

Meh... - this reminds me of the snippets of text extracted by some websites that are sometimes shown directly in Google's results, which in my case were sometimes wrong because they didn't take into account the context of what was written in the original contents.

[mike_hock]

It should do both.

[josefx]

Wouldn't it be better for the users to penalize the sites ranking instead hiding the fact that the result is your usual click bait drivel? Rewriting the titles just hides that the results Google found are low quality garbage.

[slater]

Maybe Google does both?

[logifail]

> Tested by Experts is obviously clickbait

If we're going to start filtering all "obvious clickbait" then the search results are going to change fairly dramatically...

[JumpCrisscross]

> If we're going to start filtering all "obvious clickbait" then the search results are going to change fairly dramatically

Isn’t this the intended effect?

[logifail]

> Isn’t this the intended effect?

I hate clickbait as much as the next user, but using that technique to get users to click appears to have even become part of the core business model of previously prestigious outlets.

Picking on the WaPo for no real reason:

How the Washington Post pulled off the hardest trick in journalism https://www.cjr.org/public_editor/washington-post-fluff-news...

An Open Letter to the Washington Post: Please Stop Doing Clickbait https://thedailybanter.com/2016/05/letter-to-the-washington-...

[reaperducer]

As a subscriber to several newspapers, it's always interesting to see how different the headlines are between the dead tree editions, and the online versions — even for the same story.

The dead tree headlines are almost always very factual and to the point. I don't think I've ever seen anything close to something like "Here's four awesome tricks to get China to admit to the Tiananmen Square massacre" as a headline in actual print.

[dpark]

The easiest fix for clickbait would be to penalize them for it.

[foxfluff]

More importantly, if the content is actually relevant to the user's search, does it matter whether the title is clickbait or not?

Clickbait pisses me off when it's used to waste my time, but a good search engine wouldn't give me results that waste my time.

In other words, it could give me a relevant result with a clickbait title.. I guess that'd be a little annoying but I don't know if I would want Google to be the judge on what's clickbait or not, and even then I don't feel like it's their place to override titles. I wouldn't want useful pages be downranked just for having a poor title.

[Tempest1981]

It would be a great feature if they tracked the date when the content actually changed... significantly. I guess that could still be gamed.

[LightG]

Not obviously. If true, adds credibility.

"Phone Fixer" sounds more scammy to me, lol

[eulenteufel]

> Tested by Experts is obviously clickbait; nobody's going to say [Tested by novices].

Nobody would write [Tested by novices] into their headline, but leaving out the part in the brackets would leave it open if it was tested by experts or novices. So in this case the removed bit does provide some information.

[phkahler]

>>> Because I want the title to be concise, but still help people explicitly understand what my writing is about?

And yet from TFA:

>> In fact, we found that matching your H1 to your title dropped typically dropped the degree of rewriting across the board, often dramatically.

Users don't look much at titles - they end up in the browser tab or somewhere like that. If a title doesn't match the H1 heading it's often to get more stuff in for SEO. OTOH short titles might be useful when they show up in a tab where there is limited space. Maybe they shouldn't lengthen them for that reason.